After more than five years without direct contact, Kim Aris was finally allowed to hear his mother's voice - and came away reassured about Aung San Suu Kyi's condition, but alarmed at the isolation in which the 81-year-old former leader of Myanmar is being kept.

A call at the London embassy

Aris, who has lived in the UK most of his life, spoke to his mother on Thursday at the Myanmar embassy in London. It was the first call with his 81-year-old mother in more than five years.

He said she came across as sharp and in good shape. "She still sounds certainly all there mentally, and physically she sounds strong," Aris said.

'Essentially solitary confinement'

What worried him was not her health but her surroundings. "I don't think she has anybody outside of the military or the police around her, so essentially she's been held in solitary confinement," he said.

In his account, she is completely cut off from the world: no newspapers, no radio, no television, and no awareness of events outside her walls. He believes she is being held in a fenced-off residence in Naypyidaw surrounded by scrubby land, though he cannot be certain.

Son's verdict on the regime's gestures

Aris dismissed the invitation to speak as a move by the country's military leaders designed for outside audiences, calling it part of a "public relations" campaign.

He grouped the call with earlier gestures from the junta, saying in his view that:

• •the photo opportunities the regime has staged were well-known stunts used before to pretend his mother, a national icon, was being treated fairly
• •the regime had deployed such tactics in the past

In August she was photographed during a Red Cross visit, and last week a government spokesperson published images of her smiling as officials delivered two gardening books given to her as gifts by Britain's King Charles, with a paper calendar showing the date. Aris treated both as familiar theatre.

The gestures come as former junta chief Min Aung Hlaing works to rebuild international diplomatic ties; in April he switched his military fatigues for civilian clothes after elections that were widely condemned as a sham.

Background: from state counsellor to detainee

After decades of military rule, Aung San Suu Kyi was allowed to run in a 2015 election that her party overwhelmingly won, and she became state counsellor under a civilian-military power-sharing agreement. She was deposed in a 2021 military coup and moved to an unspecified location in the capital.

Her reputation, however, had already been damaged by the 2016-2017 mass killings and expulsions of Rohingya Muslims. Aris said his mother was never "silent" on the Rohingya crisis, and that what she said on the issue "could fill volumes". He also said that as state counsellor she was "always walking on a tightrope", aware the military could strip her of power at any moment.

He acknowledged that the level of global public support for his mother had "dwindled incredibly" since the Rohingya crisis.

Aris said his mother has been locked up for five years on what he called trumped-up, politically motivated charges, and that she should be free. Activists, meanwhile, have long demanded "proof of life" for Aung San Suu Kyi as well as scores of other political prisoners.